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Loading... Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Humanby Alexander G. Weheliye
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Inaccessible text that requires multiple re-readings that's best enjoyed in the company of other critical readers/thinkers or in a graduate level course. Habeas Viscus presents the role of race in understanding the human through a unique amalgamated lens of biopolitics, racializing assemblages, feminism, and black studies. Wehelye's work is a new utilization of theories and evidence to show what many already know: racism is a deeply rooted concept from which other meanings, like that of the human, are drawn. ( ) A really solid examination and troubling of biopolitics and racialization. It can be rough to get into at first, but once you get going, it gets easier and easier to read, and by the end you're really invested. The last chapter in particular is really good in terms of thinking about what it might mean to consider a futurity outside of the western Man. I really loved chapter 5 ("Law") as well, for its examination of how documented "wounding" may be necessary for full personhood. It may really help you to have reader Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter before you read this, but it's not necessary by any stretch. A really good book overall,and one I'm glad to have read. no reviews | add a review
Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.4201Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Women Role in society, statusLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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